North Carolina is learning: Gay rights are not optional in an advanced economy

Two
protesters with signs against passage of legislation in North
Carolina that limits the bathroom options for transgender
people.AP/Skip
Foreman

North Carolina is supposed to be the heart of the new South. The
state's economy is no longer all about tobacco and textiles. It's
a big player in financial services and high-tech, and it wants to
keep adding high-skill, high-wage jobs in those sectors.

But there's an issue: A lot of lawmakers and voters in North
Carolina have a problem with the gay stuff.

As in many states in the South, sodomy was actually
illegal in North Carolina until 13 years ago, when the
Supreme Court overturned such laws. State voters passed a
gay-marriage ban with 61% of the vote in 2012.

The global power centers in high-tech and financial services are
places where it is socially unacceptable to not be cool with the
gay stuff. New York. San Francisco. Frankfurt. Pro-gay-rights
norms are strong in these industries, both imposed from the
C-suite and expected by workers.

So it was probably inevitable that North Carolina would be put in
the position of choosing between its business stuff and its
problem with the gay stuff, as we've seen with
Tuesday's announcement that Deutsche Bank has canceled plans
to add 250 high-paying financial-services jobs in the state.

Deustche did that because in March the state hastily enacted a
law that prohibits local governments from protecting LGBT people
from discrimination in employment, housing, or public
accommodations. The state did this because Charlotte (not
coincidentally the heart of North Carolina's financial industry)
had passed an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting LGBT
people.

Republican state lawmakers have hysterically characterized the
law as being about bathrooms — that is, the law was needed to
stop the supposed threat of men using the guise of transgenderism
to enter women's restrooms in Charlotte and watch women pee.

Maybe bathroom panic will fly with some bigoted or ignorant
voters who fear trans people. But this isn't just a matter of the
anti-LGBT preferences of North Carolina voters. Besides Deutsche
Bank, PayPal also canceled plans to add hundreds of new
high-paying jobs in the state because of the law. The state
may also lose next year's NBA All-Star Game, currently
planned for Charlotte.

Human
Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin, center, at a news
conference at the old state Capitol.AP Photo/Gary Robertson

There has been a lot of talk in this presidential campaign about
the problems wrought by global economic integration — not all of
it unreasonable. There have been real, negative job impacts from
global-manufacturing trade in certain parts of the US. But one
advantage of global economic integration is that the most
economically productive places tend, on average, to have the most
enlightened social ideas.

In this case, global economic integration is furthering the
export of good ideas like LGBT equality from places like San
Francisco and Frankfurt to places like North Carolina.

This probably seems terribly unfair to a lot of social
conservatives. Who are these German bankers to tell North
Carolina what kind of laws to have? Besides, they say, this law
isn't anti-gay. It's about individual rights and the freedom to
run your own business in whatever pro-gay or anti-gay way you see
fit — social conservatives just want the law to stop us
from oppressing them.

To that, I would say this.

Not long ago, social conservatives wanted to use the power of the
law to punish non-normative sexuality. Really not long ago: Gay
sex was illegal in North Carolina inthis
century. Only since public opinion and the Supreme Court
have moved in the direction of gay rights have the goals of
social conservatives gotten smaller and supposedly focused around
individual rights.

Well, if individual rights are the new goal, where's the "I'm
sorry I made your sex life illegal"? Where is "I'm sorry I tried
to deny you equal marriage under the law, as a separate matter
from my feelings or my organization's principles"?

We're not hearing that because they're not sorry.

The new "opt-out" anti-gay agenda is just about expanding the
zone of oppression as far as the current political environment
will allow. The underlying principles, the ones that formerly led
these same people to feel gay sex should be a crime, remain the
same. There is no reason to assume their arguments about
individual rights and "freedom" are in good faith.

And so, to the German bankers standing up against that, I say
danke schön. Deutsche Bank is just another participant in the
long tradition of outsiders dragging the South, kicking and
screaming, toward equal treatment of minority groups.